Stop the Blame: Population Control Imagery (1933-2008)

A new multimedia tool from the Population and Development Program out of Hampshire College chronicles the history of beliefs about population control. Stop the Blame: Population Control Imagery (1933-2008) is available for download or on CD, and lays out a ton of images from newspapers, magazines and other media from the last 70 years. The images illustrate exactly how our beliefs about population, developing countries and the environment have been shaped by eugenics, racism and many other ideological factors.

This digital flash archive displays historical prints, posters and articles that articulate overpopulation anxieties and illustrate population control policies. The interactive presentation offers a rare overview of the visual media of past and present population control agendas in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. It is a tool that can be used in classrooms, activist trainings, and public talks. Each image is accompanied by a written description that provides context and food for thought.

They were nice enough to send me a review copy of the CD and it is really a fantastic teaching tool. My blurb about the project:

The Stop the Blame multimedia project does what a simple written history cannot: it shows us the interplay between race, population, eugenics and the environment.... This project should be a required teaching tool for all history and sociology courses.

It's worth checking out, and best of all, it's free! You can download it or request a hard copy here.
Posted by Miriam - February 09, 2009, at 08:55AM |источник

Margaret Sanger Biography: Margaret Sanger Founder of the Birth Control League

Margaret Sanger was the founder of the Birth Control League
She was born in Corning, New York on September 14, 1879 and was one among eleven siblings. But her mother had undergone eighteen pregnancies. Some of her babies died in infancy, and after this arduous experience of numerous pregnancies and childbirths, her mother died of tuberculosis and cervical cancer.
Her father had ideas like advocating women’s suffrage and free public education. Margaret Sanger seems to have inherited at least in part her ideals from her father’s ideas as well as from her own experiences in a large family. Being the sixth of eleven siblings, she had to assist in household chores and in the upbringing of her younger siblings.
She started her schooling in a boarding school named Claverack College, but had to give up her education half-way to come home and help nurse her ailing mother. After her mother passed away in 1896, she enrolled herself in a hospital in White Plains as part of their program for training nurses.
She got married and had her first baby in 1903. Incidentally she had contracted tuberculosis from her ailing mother. During this time another misfortune befell her when her home was burned in an accidental fire. She later moved to New York City and took up work in the Manhattan slums.
Her experience thus far motivated her to write about them and she started a column “What Every Girl Should Know”, that she published in the ‘New York Call’. She also wrote a pamphlet, her first of many other publications to follow, under the title ‘Family Limitation’.
Her ideas were ahead of her times and when she spoke and wrote about contraceptives it was looked upon as obscene. She risked imprisonment, but was fortunate to be able to continue her activities unmolested by the law for some time at least.
A turning point in her life was when she was called upon to nurse a lady named Sadie Sachs who had undergone a self-induced abortion which led to her health begin affected dangerously. In those days abortion was frowned upon and no medical practitioner would undertake to perform one. After few months Sadie Sachs died while again trying to abort her baby. This got Sanger thinking of the ways and means to prevent such deaths and unwanted pregnancies.
Before she could move on with her mission, she separated from her husband.
But she did not allow this separation to hinder what she had in mind. She started a monthly magazine named ‘The Woman Rebel’ that discussed ways and means of preventing unwanted pregnancies through the use of contraceptives. This magazine was the first to use the term ‘Birth Control’.
The law again intervened and she was accused of having violated obscenity laws by the US postal department. She was indicted in August 1914, but she escaped the clutches of the law by jumping bail and sailing across the Atlantic under an assumed name “Bertha Watson”.
Later in 1915, she returned to the US to continue her initiatives despite legal hurdles, and wrote many books that included ‘Woman and the New Race’ published in 1920, ‘The Pivot of Civilization’ published in 1922, ‘Happiness in Marriage’ published in 1926, ‘My Fight For Birth Control’ published in 1931 and her own autobiography published in 1938.
Finally Margaret Sanger’s ideas were accepted at least by the pro-abortion groups while she was and still is condemned by the pro-life groups. But we can say that at the end of a long struggle she succeeded in raising awareness about this critical issue of birth control and contraception. She passed away on September 6, 1966.

The Life Story Of Margaret Sanger

The Life Story Of Margaret Sanger
The Life Of Margaret Sanger:Margaret Sanger Slee Higgins (14 September 1879 – September 6, 1966) is an American birth control activist and founder of the American League for Birth Control.
The Life Of Margaret Sanger:
Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Margaret Sanger’s mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was a devout Catholic who survived 18 pregnancies (11 live births)  to die of tuberculosis and cancer of the cervix. Sanger’s father, Michael Higgins, Hennessy, earning a living, bore the angels and saints of the huge blocks of white marble or gray granite gravestones ” , as well as an activist women’s suffrage, and free public education. Sanger was the sixth of eleven children  , and spent much of his youth assistance in housekeeping and care of her younger brothers and sisters. Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Claverack within two years. The sisters paid her tuition fees. Sanger returned home in 1896 following his father’s request to return home to feed the mother. Her mother died March 31, 1896. By the end of the century, the mother of one of his friends arranged for her Claverack enroll in the program of care in a hospital in White Plains, New York-rich suburbs. In 1902, Margaret Higgins
married architect William Sanger and the couple settled in New York. Margaret Sanger was developed tuberculosis as a result of caring for her sick mother and her own fatigue and Sangers moved to Saranac, New York Adirondacks, for health reasons. In 1903 she gave birth to her first child, Stuart.
In 1912, after a fire destroyed the house, her husband was developed, Sanger and her family moved to New York where he went to work in the slums of East Side of Manhattan. In the same year she also began writing a column for the New York Call “What Every Girl Should Know.” Distribution of brochures, Family Limitation, for women, Sanger repeatedly caused scandal and threatened with imprisonment, in violation of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene distribution of contraceptive information and devices.
Sanger felt that in order for women to have more “equal” in society, both physically and mentally healthy life, they should be able to decide when a pregnancy is most convenient for himself.   In addition, access to birth control and carry out a critical psychological need, allowing women to be able to fully enjoy sexual relations without being burdened by the fear of pregnancy.
Sanger and her husband William moved to New York in 1910. They plunged into the radical bohemian culture, which was then flourishing in Greenwich Village . Margaret Sanger friends with local intellectuals, artists and public figures. Some of the more famous friends, they were associated with were John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.
As Margaret Sanger worked in Lower New York East Side with the poor women who were repeatedly suffering from frequent childbirth and abortion herself, she began to talk about the need for women to get acquainted with the state of birth control. Although she worked as nurse, Sanger met Sadie Sachs, where she was called to his home to help her after she became extremely ill due to spontaneous abortion. Then Sachs asked the attending doctor to tell her how she could let this happen again, that the doctor simply gave advice to remain moderate  . A few months later, Sanger once again called back to the apartment Sachs, only this time, Sachs, was found dead after a new self abortion  . This was a turning point in their lives in Sanger. difficult Sachs’ was not unusual for this period . Margaret Sanger believed, then, more than ever that she wanted to do something to help desperate women, before they were forced to follow the dangerous and illegal abortions .
Margaret separately from her husband, William in 1913. In 1914, Sanger began Rebel Woman, 8 pages per month newsletter promoting contraception, with the slogan “No Gods and No Masters” (and chasing birth control  and every woman to be “the absolute mistress of your own body.” She is accused of violating U.S. laws on postal obscenity in August 1914, but jumped bail and fled to England under the alias “Bertha Watson. Sanger returned to the U.S. in October 1915 and her 5-year-old daughter, Peggy, died November 6  .
In 1915, William Sanger circulated a copy of the publication of his wife, family restrictions, to the postal worker who was actually an illegal situation. Because he was found to be distributing “indecent” material, he was imprisoned for 30 days, while his wife was still in Europe.
Family Planning Clinics :
In 1915 Sanger visited the Dutch birth control clinic, where she found that the diaphragm is actually more effective means of contraception than candles and soul that it extends back to the United States . This realization began to slow introduction of the membrane in the United States with Sanger later illegally smuggle them into the country  .
In 1916, Sanger published, that every girl should know, which was later widely used as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius “Blue Book”. It provides information on issues such as menstruation and sexuality among adolescents. This was followed in 1917 that every mother should know. She also started a monthly magazine of Birth Control Review and birth control News and contributed articles on health on paper of the Socialist Party, Call.
On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in Brownsville area of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. He was searched nine days later the police. She served 30 days in jail. The initial appeal was rejected, and in 1918 a written opinion of Judge Frederick E. Crane in New York appellate court allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives.
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921. In 1922 she came to Japan to work with the Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promote fertility; in the next few years, she returned six more times for this purpose. In the same year she married her second husband, oil magnate James Noah H. Slee.
In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established a Clinical Research Bureau (CRB). Sanger eventually found a loophole in the system, when she learned that doctors were exempt from the law, which prohibits the dissemination of contraceptive information to women when prescribed for medical reasons.   With the help of his wealthy supporters, Sanger was finally able to open the first legal clinic of birth control, which was staffed by only women doctors and social workers. It was the first legal clinic, birth control in the U.S. (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940). She received a major grant from the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. with the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1924. Grants were made anonymously to avoid public exposure Rockefeller’s agenda. Families also consistently supported its efforts in respect of population contro.
In addition, in 1923 she formed the National Committee on federal legislation to regulate fertility and served as president until its dissolution in 1937 after the birth control, under medical supervision, was legalized in many states. In 1927 Sanger helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva.
Between 1921 and 1926 Sanger received over a million letters from mothers to provide information on birth control. From 1916 to teaching “in many places-halls, churches, women’s clubs, homes, theaters” to “many types of audiences-cotton workers, clergy, liberals, socialists, scientists, members of the club, and fashionable, philanthropic-minded women. ”
In 1926, Sanger gave a lecture on birth control to women’s auxiliary Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.  She described him as “one of the strange experience I had in a lecture,” and added that it should only use “the most basic terms, as if I’m trying to understand children.”   Sanger was well received by the group, and as a result of “a dozen invitations to similar groups offered.”
In 1928 Sanger resigned as President of the ABCL, severing all legal relations, and took full control of the CRB, renamed it Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.  Two years later she became president of the Birth Control International Information Centre. In January 1932 she appeared in a new history of society, the organization created by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab and Julie Chanler, this address later become the basis for an article entitled “Plan of the world.
In 1937, Sanger became the chairman of the Council on birth control of America and started two publications Birth Control Review “and” Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942 she was an honorary delegate of the Federation of American Birth Control, which is included as an observer with a Negro project, along with Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble.   From 1952 to 1959 she worked as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, while it was the largest private international “family planning” organizations.
In the early 1960 Sanger contributed to the use of newly available contraceptive pill. She toured Europe, Africa and Asia, lecturing and assistance in establishing the clinic.
Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, 8 days shy of its eighty-seventh birthday, and only a few months after Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S., the top of its 50-year-old days.
Sanger books include Woman and the New Generation “(1920), Pivot Civilization (1922), Happiness in Marriage (1926), my struggle for birth control (1931) and autobiography (1938).
The book, Motherhood in Bondage, a large collection of actual letters that were written by Margaret Sanger in desperation, thousands of women who have requested to receive information on how they can prevent pregnancy for a large number of different reasons
Although Sanger was greatly influenced by her father, her mother left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction with respect to its own understanding of society and women’s health and childbirth. She also criticized the censorship of her message about sexuality and contraception, civil and religious authorities as an attempt by men to keep women in subjection. Atheist, Sanger attacked Christian leaders against her message, accusing them of obscurantism and insensitivity to women’s issues. Sanger was particularly important in the lack of awareness about the dangers and lack of opportunities for the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases among women. She argued that these social problems are the result of male institutions deliberately keep women in ignorance. Sanger also deplored the lack of modern rules requiring registration of people with sexually transmitted diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of persons with communicable diseases such as measles).
Psychology Of  Sexuality :
Aware of Sanger and practical approach to human physiology were progressive for its time, her thoughts on the psychology of human sexuality place her right in the pre-Freudian nineteenth century . Contraceptives, it would seem, was to her more money to limit unwanted side effects of sex than a way to release the men and women to enjoy it [original research?]. In what every girl should know, she writes: “Every normal man and woman has the right to control and direct his sexual impulse. The man and woman, which he controls and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, never sensible.” Sexuality for her a kind of weakness, and he said, breaking the force.
Sanger also affects psychologist Havelock Ellis, in particular in relation to his theories about female sexuality and its importance.  His views have inspired Sanger to expand their arguments for birth control, arguing that in addition to the already large number of reasons, it would also fulfill a critical psychological need, allowing women to fully enjoy a sexual relationship, free from fear of unwanted pregnancy.   After Sanger and her husband divorced later, Sanger had an affair with Ellis, and reportedly a close relationship with HG Wells  .
Although the germ cells located in parts of the anatomy for the main purpose of easily expelling them into women to reproduction, there are other elements in the sexual fluids, which are the essence of blood, nerves, brain and muscles. When redirected to building and strengthening of these, we find that men and women of the greatest endurance highest magnetic energy. A girl can waste the creative forces of love to ponder the extent of the exhaustion of its system, and the results do not differ from the effects of masturbation and debauchery.
Eugenics And Euthanasia :

Margaret Sanger was an advocate of negative eugenics, social philosophy, which asserts that human hereditary traits can be improved through social action. Sanger in hereditary politicians ran to the removal of immigration policy, free access to birth control methods, and complete autonomy in family planning for the able-minded, as well as a mandatory separation or sterilization for deeply depressed. It specifically condemned euthanasia as a tool of eugenics.
The plan of the world (1932), for example, Sanger suggested Congress Department:
Keep doors closed to immigration entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to endurance races, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, others in this class barred by immigration laws in 1924 .
And, the following:
Best stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already outdated, or whose inheritance is such that undesirable traits can be transmitted to the offspring .
Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent “dysgenic” children from birth in a disadvantaged life, and dismissed “positive eugenics” (which promoted greater fertility “fitter” upper classes), and inappropriate. While many leaders in the negative eugenics movement calling for active euthanasia “is not suitable,” Sanger spoke out against such methods. She believes that women have the power and knowledge of birth control was in the best position to produce “fit” children. She rejected any of eugenics that would take control in the hands of those actually giving birth.
Sanger believes that the responsibility for birth control, should remain in the hands of a skilled minded individual parents, not the state, but independent of motherhood was the only unshakeable foundation for improving the race, she wrote:
“The campaign for birth control not only of eugenic value, but practically coincides with the ultimate goal of eugenics …. We are convinced that racial regeneration, like individual regeneration, must come from within. That is, it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from outside. ”
We believe that a woman has sufficient knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of time and conditions under which the child should be brought into the world. In addition, we believe that it is right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she would bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she wants to become a mother … Only in the case of a free, self-determining motherhood can be any unshakable structure of racial improvement.
Freedom Of Speech :
Margaret Sanger was an ardent defender of freedom of speech had been arrested at least 8 times to express their views at a time when public speaking in favor of birth control was illegal. She said in an interview that she was under the influence of an agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll, who spoke in his native town, when she was 12 years old.

Read more: http://www.dalimunthe.com/2010/07/life-story-of-margaret-sanger.html#ixzz0v4T454yp

Christians Reexamine Morality of Birth Control

July 28, 2010
(RNS) -- Is contraception a sin? The very suggestion made Bryan Hodge and his classmates at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute laugh.
As his friends scoffed and began rebutting the oddball idea, Hodge found himself on the other side, poking holes in their arguments. He finished a bachelor's degree in biblical theology at Moody and earned a master's degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Now, more than a decade later, he is trying to drive a hole the size of the ark through what has become conventional wisdom among many Christians: that contraception is perfectly moral.
His book, "The Christian Case Against Contraception," was published in November. Hodge, a former Presbyterian pastor who is now a layman in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, realizes his mission is quixotic.
In the 50 years since the birth-control pill hit the market, contraception in all its forms has become as ubiquitous as the minivan, and dramatically changed social mores as it opened the possibilities for women.
No less than other Americans, Christians were caught up in the cultural conflagration. In a nation where 77 percent of the population claims to be Christian, 98 percent of women who have ever had sexual intercourse say they've used at least one method of birth control.
The pill is the most preferred method, followed closely by female sterilization (usually tying off fallopian tubes).
"People are no longer ... thinking about it," says Hodge, 36, who had to agree with a Christian publisher who rejected his book on grounds that contraception is a nonstarter, a settled issue. "People don't even ask if there is anything possibly morally wrong about it."
For more than 19 centuries, every Christian church opposed contraception.
Under pressure from social reformers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Anglican Communion (and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church) became the first to allow married couples with grave reasons to use birth control.
That decision cracked a door that, four decades later, was thrown wide open with the relatively safe, effective birth-control pill, which went on the market in this country in the summer of 1960. Virtually every Protestant denomination had lifted the ban by the mid-1960s.
Even evangelicals within mainline Protestant and nondenominational churches embraced the pill as a way that married couples could enjoy their God-given sexuality without fear of untimely pregnancy.
"It was a reaction to that whole Victorian thing where sex was seen as dirty," says Hodge, who lives in Pennsylvania.
There remains one massive holdout among major Christian churches -- the Roman Catholic Church, which expressed its opposition in no uncertain terms in Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.
To separate the two functions of marital intimacy -- the life-transmitting from the bonding -- is to reject God's design, Paul VI wrote.
"The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life -- and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman," Humanae Vitae proclaimed.
Janet Smith, a Catholic seminary professor whose writing and talks have been influential for two decades, puts it this way: "God himself is love, and it's the very nature of love to overflow into new life. Take the baby-making power out of sex, and it doesn't express love. All it expresses is physical attraction."
The church's ban on contraception stunned many, including one of the doctors who created the pill, Harvard's John Rock, a Catholic. By and large, Catholics went with the culture rather than the church.
A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.
"The ban on contraception is completely irrelevant to Catholics," said Jon O'Brien, president of the group Catholics for Choice. "We know the position the hierarchy has on contraception is fundamentally flawed, and that's why it's ignored en masse."
The Rev. Ken Vialpando, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ogden, Utah, places much of the blame for Catholics' disobedience on priests who are reticent to talk about church teachings on marriage and sex, or who bought into the 1960s notion that one's conscience was a sufficient guide.
"What if our consciences are not fully informed?" Vialpando asked. "How can we fault the people if they haven't heard about it and recognize the purpose or meaning of marriage?"
Smith, whose recorded 1994 talk "Contraception, Why Not?" has sold more than 1 million copies, says young adult evangelicals and Catholics, including men studying for the priesthood, seem more open to the possibility that contraception is a sin.
The pendulum may yet swing, she said.
"They are going to have a huge impact," says Smith, who holds an ethics chair at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. "They already are."
The Rev. Greg Johnson of Sandy, Utah, who is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, says most evangelicals remain firmly in the contraceptive camp, even if some stress that it should not be used frivolously or to avoid children altogether.
A recent Gallup poll of the association, and another of its board, found 90 percent support for contraception.
Such statistics are disheartening for evangelicals such as Hodge and James Tour, a renowned chemist specializing in nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston, who believe contraception is not biblical.
Rather than heeding Christian theology to be "agents of life in the world," Christians have largely adopted culture's philosophic naturalism, which considers sex an itch to be scratched, Hodge said.
"They have the same view of conception that atheists have."
Evangelicals' dearth of understanding about sexuality and marriage explains why they have trouble arguing against gay marriage, he contends. Contracepted sex, in his view, is no different from gay sex: It's not life-giving either way.
Tour, a Jew who converted to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, like Catholics endorses "natural family planning" -- avoiding intercourse during the woman's monthly fertile cycle -- but wonders if Christians ought to forgo even that measure of family planning.
He says young lustful men who have had unfettered access to their wives actually welcome a message of self-restraint.
"The women are looking for relief. The men are looking for relief," Tour says. "They're like, 'I want that. I want to live in peace. I want to live in fulfillment.'"
Throwing out contraception "is more trusting in God. It ultimately lets him decide what is the right number (of children)," Tour said. "Protestants in 30 or 50 years are going to say, `My God. What were we thinking in those generations?'"
Copyright 2010 Religion News Service. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The drug of choice

SOCIETY: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, by Elaine Tyler May, Basic Books, 171pp, $25.95
IT WAS going to cure everything that ailed us – marital strife, unwanted pregnancies, war. By lowering the birth rate in the developing world, it would create healthy markets and decrease poverty, acting as a “magic bullet” against communism. As the first nearly-one-hundred-percent-effective form of birth control that required neither the co-operation nor the knowledge of men, it would enable women to take control of their lives. It was the pill, and it is celebrating its 50th birthday.
In her new book, American historian Elaine Tyler May traces the pill’s development, reception, and social, political and cultural ramifications. The pill was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1960 for use as an oral contraceptive (it first became available in Ireland in 1963 as a “cycle regulator”). It grew out of the combined efforts of several individuals – scientists Carl Djerassi, John Rock and Gregory Pincus, along with feminist activists Margaret Sanger and Katharine Dexter McCormick (McCormick effectively bankrolled the R&D). Highly controversial, it created unlikely bedfellows on both sides of the divide. Would-be social engineers allied both with feminists and with the Playboy brigade, who celebrated the pill because it liberated female sexuality for men.
The Church was against it. But so were male Black Power leaders (claiming it promoted genocide) and certain Beats. Poet Richard Brautigan equated his girlfriend’s use of the pill with the Springhill mine disaster, in which scores of miners died. Many men felt it undermined masculinity, by nullifying their procreative power.
The pill quickly became embroiled in policy debates. US presidents from Kennedy to Carter supported family planning programmes as part of foreign aid. Reagan reversed the position, suspending government support to any agency at home or abroad that used its own funds to support abortion services, counselling or referral. Clinton reversed the ruling five days into office. George W Bush restored it three days into his term. Four days after his swearing in, Obama reversed it again.
The pill’s safety record was initially troubling. As May points out, it was linked in the early years with blood clots – fatal, in some cases. It carried an increased risk of stroke. (While a minority of women today experience negative side-effects, the lower hormone dosages have resulted in decreased risks.) May also looks at efforts, so far unsuccessful, to develop a pill for men, and asks whether the hurdles are physiological or psychological. She notes that Viagra, a drug that enhances the potential for men to impregnate women, was the most successful prescription drug ever launched in the US.
The pill serves throughout the book as a keyhole through which to view history. “Without the political and cultural upheavals of the last 50 years,” May writes, “ . . . the pill would have been just one more contraceptive . . . Instead, it became a flash point for major social transformation.” Debates around its safety contributed to standards of informed consent in medical research and regulations on consumer information. It disrupted power relationships between genders, and – in light of the Church’s continued ban on artificial birth control – it weakened the power of the official Church and turned many Catholics away altogether.
May’s interesting and accessible history also illuminates how the world has changed around the pill. Once, young women had to pretend that they were married in order to obtain it; now they sometimes complain of being pressured into it when other forms of contraception are more suitable. Women use the pill for reasons their foremothers wouldn’t have dreamed of – to arrest menstruation during military service, for instance. And, what once seemed a boon to women – taking full responsibility for their fertility – now seems to many an unfair burden.

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Molly McCloskey is a novelist, essayist and short story writer

Everything you wanted to know about condoms

NYC condoms. victoriapeckham via flickr.com

By Mark Hay

7:16 am Jul. 14, 2010 | Tweet this article

“Oh, please tell me those aren’t used,” said a frumpy little woman who declined to be named for fear of association with something she considered so unseemly.
She gazed at a shovel full of blacked condoms, most likely used, collected from the trash cans and floors of London’s notorious gay and fetish club, FIST, and encased in resin by Franko B. B’s found-artifact sculpture is one of the first works visible upon stepping through the door to the Museum of Sex’s recent and self-explanatory exhibit, “Rubbers: The Life, History and Struggle of the Condom.”
The exhibit, occupying half of the museum’s second floor, is composed chiefly of curios—half-century-old condom tins and prophylactic propaganda through the ages—and a handful of artistic pieces. Progressing along the wall, the artifacts trace the historical and social evolution of the condom from a Papua New Guinean penis sheath mounted on the wall, through the linen condoms of the 1500s (after the 1493 syphilis outbreak, graphically depicted) and animal intestine wrappers of the 1700s, and straight to the Obama/McCain/Palin novelties of today.
Fittingly, the exhibit features, although not prominently, artifacts that reveal the special resonance of the condom’s history with New York City. A 2006 replica of a brittle pre-rubber sheep-intestine condom is modeled on the process used by Julius Schmid, 46th Street’s late-19th-early-20th-century condom innovator and later father of the Fourex, Ramses and Sheik brands, among others. The display of a frayed copy of Margaret Sanger’s 1915 What Every Girl Should Know recalls her 1916 founding of a Brooklyn family planning clinic, the forerunner to Planned Parenthood.
To reach “Rubbers,” patrons must first walk through “Action: Sex and the Moving Image,” a ground- floor installation with wall- and floor-mounted screens looping clips of mainstream sex scenes and pornographic film stretching back nearly a century. Many patrons do not make it past, their eyes glued to Chloe Sevigney’s non-simulated oral sex scene from “The Brown Bunny,” a couple demonstrating positions from the Kama Sutra narrated by what sounds like a telemarketer, or midcentury “Jungle Quest” films of nude African women suckling small animals.
Patrons must then pass a line of BDSM artifacts, real dolls with their erogenous bits hanging out to be fondled by visitors, and a sketch by Wally Wood of various Disney standards engaged in non-Disney behavior, among other sexual miscellanea.
Past the gamut, last night, 10 or fewer patrons milled around the “Rubbers” exhibit, a third of those in “Action,” and few stayed very long. This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that he exhibit is ... challenging. “Rubbers” is a text-heavy exhibit, with most of the artifacts serving to frame or illuminate a P.S.A.-style narrative. It even includes a P.S.A., one of the only audio-visual components, although it is a unique one. Corners of the exhibit meander into tangential territory, abandoning condoms to discuss H.I.V., S.T.I.s, and sex education.
The dispassionate academic voice of the exhibit fits with the sociological mission of MoSex, scrawled across the second floor wall: "The Museum of Sex is dedicated to the preservation of an ever growing collection of sexually related objects, which support its mission to present the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality." But many patrons come for eroticism as much as edification, even if that is not MoSex’s intent. It is easier to get hot and bothered to “Action” than “Rubbers,” as a forty-something whitebread couple groping in front of a video display of transsexual/transvestite porn demonstrated.
Blatant product placement for the exhibits' sponsor, Trojan, also detracts from the total effect.
“How far is a Trojan required to stretch before breaking? More than seven-and-a-half times its original size!” boasts the narrator on a looping behind-the-scenes Trojan promotional visual. The audio fills at least half of the room.
Among the historical trinkets there lurk a few attempts at fun.
One wall is covered in 60 contemporary euphemisms for the condom. Though many are familiar, favorites include: bishop, blast shield, DNA lounge, English riding coat, French tickler, hazmat suit, Manhattan eel, and zucchini beanie.
Across the room, a series of paintings by Masami Teraoka, especially “Kanzashi Pond,” embody the spirit of the exhibit, designed in the classical ukiyo-e style while encoded with references to AIDS, cultural condom controversy, women’s liberation, and a slew of other themes. Nearby hover mechanical contraptions flapping their inflated condom appendages. A glass case sits at the end of the toy array containing a purple dress meticulously crafted of condoms.
Even the often-dry textual narration has its moments.
“The female condom is longer and wider than a male condom,” explains Douglas Blair Turnbaugh in a quote posted next to his photograph of a man, face down, with a condom protruding from his rear. “Once the condom is inserted, the anus will close over it leaving the outer ring looking rather like the bulls eye of a target. As the entering virile member, or whatever, does its business, in out in out in out, the condom stays in place.”
A footnote of explication reveals that the quote relates to a little-known use for the female condom in gay culture. The condom may be applied at any time, allowing for easy sex without the mood-killing reminder of the AIDS epidemic’s toll on the gay population that so many men feel when applying a male condom.
This is the first sign of nuance to the otherwise peppy pro-condom note of the exhibit. A plaque offers observations from the Kinsey Institute. Many men experience allergic irritation to latex; 37 percent of men lose erections when psychologically fazed by putting on a condom; massive variations in penis girth mean that discomfort can come from a tight fit; and many condoms lose their efficiency when ripped while being unwrapped using a nail or tooth.
One note of caution about this exhibit: whereas viewing erotic objects is often thought of as a solo activity, viewing them as sociological artifacts appears to be a couples’ activity. Patrons move in twos and, although viewing the objects in a sterile museum setting, if you go, either get comfortable with the idea of circulating among pairs of silent, eyes-forward spectators, or bring a partner.

женское голосование в США

women were first allowed to vote in New Jersey in 1776. Women had also been able to vote even earlier than that in some cases, such as in Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War.

n those days, voting rights were usually tied to property ownership because many of the taxes were based on property, and the founders didn’t think it was right for non-property-owning, non-tax-paying people to be able to tell property-owning taxpayers what to do with their own property.

Women had this right in many areas of Colonial America and the new republic, but Barton said it went away in 1809 in New Jersey; New Jersey was the only state that specifically put it in their Constitution.

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http://www.dakotavoice.com/2010/07/women-of-the-american-revolution/

Glenn Beck Demonizes Margaret Sanger